Thursday, December 10, 2015

With Pen and Paper

After five months of working on the 2nd draft of my novel, I'm back in writing short stories. Fear not, I will pick the novel back up after a month or two has elapsed.

Last night, I was reminded of how much I love writing by hand. I've written about four pages on a yellow pad, and the words just flowed out as if I broke a spigot inside my brain. It was a meditative writing session, and I couldn't contain myself even as I write this entry. There is a huge difference between writing with ink and writing through a keyboard.

I had thought about buying a typewriter once, but I imagined that would be cumbersome and loud. Plus, I'm too cheap and lazy to maintain it. Instead of fantasizing about the clickity-clack and ding of a typewriter, I opted for pen and paper.

When I was a kid, I wrote everything with pen and paper: my stories, poems and some doodles that went at the back pages of my notebooks in school. Even with a computer at home, I still did my stories with ink until I started writing scripts. Those went on the computer. I remember downloading a program called Dramatica so I can start writing serious.

That's when longhand fell out in vogue for me. As I wrote more, I started to believe that writing by hand would be a waste of time because you have to transcribe what you wrote into a MS Word document. So the cycle continued by typing out words upon words upon words, sometimes feeling drained every session.

Recently, something just snapped in me. I thought about why I wrote, why I wanted to tell stories. This soul-searching led me back to those days in grade school and high school, drawing and writing stuff in the back of my notebook whenever I was bored in class. And so I returned to my creative roots and started writing with pen and paper again.

I had to relearn writing by hand since it looked like chicken scratch. But I'm making progress, and I think I'm getting better at it. Then again, I'm the only one who could decipher it. My 'e's look like 'c's and my 'r's look like 'n's. Still, I can tell them apart.

I wrote the first draft of my novel by hand, and I plan on continuing to do so. Some professional writers do so to this day: Quentin Tarantino, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, JK Rowling to name a few. Even though it's a slow process compared to typing it up, it's all about the immersion I experience whenever I put pen to paper.

1 comment:

Made the comment about the typewriter before I read this. I find writing (with a pencil for me) more convenient and fluid. Sometimes what you want to write comes so fast that mechanical cannot catch up with the spurt of thoughts you want to put down. Writing. That is how I made my decisions,as a judge, and legal briefs and memorandum as a lawyer. Dad.